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It's $6.99, I'd buy it but I'd have to sell some of my shoes. I'm willing to do that if it really works on Win7.

I downloaded an old ISO of HardWar not long before it went up for sale on DotEmu.

Worked great on Windows 7/64, with zero problems. I plan on buying it legit when I come back around to it.

DotEmu, by the way, is a legit operation, they're just a little less put together than GOG is, and English isn't their first language. I think they're based in France. I picked up some freebies from their site during a summer promotion.

I've played most of these - Hardwar is a great game, a modern remake with few modifications would be quite good.

I would really love to see Infinity see completion and manifestation as a full game. If you've not seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch this in HD first, then check out the website. I'd pay an obscene amount of money to play this game.

For the last six or seven years my copy of Freelancer has been helping raise my second monitor to eye-height. I tried it when it was first released but bounced off - the mouse control didn't feel right to me and the gameplay was much more like a twitchy FPS in three dimensions than what I was hoping for.

Having said that, the fondness that everyone else seems to have for it makes me wonder if I missed something after all.

I would really love to see Infinity see completion and manifestation as a full game. If you've not seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch this in HD first, then check out the website. I'd pay an obscene amount of money to play this game.

Every time I hear about a space-game someone trots out Infinity. And every year it seems even less likely to show signs of actually being a finished game. It's oh-so ambitious and the engine looks so incredible... but you know what else did? Universal Combat.

I'll be the third person to recommend EV (I think the original would be one of my "gaming made me" but it hasn't aged well). Unfortunately last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, it wasn't possible to register the full game on Windows 7.

So it seems that all the hype goes to SR2: Reboot, Hardware and EV: Nova?
I'm trying to find something better than SR2, but I think it's unlikely. It's not perfect, but it's too good.

What are your opinions on SPAZ?

I've been playing it, and I've enjoyed it quite a bit so far. I wouldn't heap much praise on the writing, but the systems in play are fun, if not incredibly deep. So far it's had a nice sense of progression and I've felt that I had the freedom to make my own path. The 'tech tree' so to speak is influenced by story missions, which I resisted for a while, but they are worthwhile. I wish there were a few more factions or that diplomacy was a bit deeper, but it really is a good game. And quite an impressive project from a two-man team.

Edit:
I recently was able to build a ship with a massive weapon mount for the first time and I outfitted it with all beam weapons and beam upgrades. I set my two follower ships to missile-duty. That beam frigate chews through space stations now with ease.

I'm trying to find something better than SR2, but I think it's unlikely.

I'd keep an eye out for Starfarer, perhaps it won't be better than SR2, but it's the closest new thing to Star Control 2 that I've found.

SPAZ didn't do it for me, it was very addictive for a while, until I realized that it's just a continuous grind, without much else going on (it felt very similar to Torchlight, now that I think about it).

X3:Terran Conflict is the best recommendation I can make. It's had several significant improvements over X3: Reunion in terms of interface and UI. While it does require a huge investment in time to do everything the game can offer, there's no reason to do those things if you don't find them fun. A great deal of fun can be had by just flying about in your fighter and capturing smaller pirate vessels. But you can also trade, mine, commit acts of piracy, manufacture, or even just flip used ships if that suits you.

If you're looking for something less complicated any of the free elite remakes will work. If you're willing to forgo an open universe and are willing to try out a more traditional mission-based space combat game, you can try some of the fan made games built on the now open-source freespace 2 engine. Wing Commander Saga and the Babylon 5 mods come to mind. Freelancer gets as many mentions as it does because it provides an interesting universe while remaining relatively easy to play. The rest of the open-world style games are almost all complex multi-level sims.

While I am as ignorant and irrational as the next man, I am also arrogant enough to assume I possess these qualities in greater abundance than is strictly normal and foolish enough to think that that's worth bragging about.

Evochron Merc is a little hard to look at, and for that reason I haven't progressed past the tutorial. Videos and screenshots make it look fantastic, but my display says otherwise.

I can't sing the praises of SR2: Reboot loudly enough.
There's a great game inside Freelancer somewhere, but I haven't found it yet.
I can't get Hardwar to run properly on my machine.
SPAZ is close, but not quite there.
I'm hoping Starfarer will be it, ​forever and ever.

I'd keep an eye out for Starfarer, perhaps it won't be better than SR2, but it's the closest new thing to Star Control 2 that I've found.

SPAZ didn't do it for me, it was very addictive for a while, until I realized that it's just a continuous grind, without much else going on (it felt very similar to Torchlight, now that I think about it).

I'm one of the folks working on Project 6014, a fan-made sequel to Star Control 2. We released a new alpha demo a few days ago. Windows/Linux/OSX, free and open-source. It's running off of the original engine from 1992, only heavily modified so that we can get pretty (optional) high-resolution graphics out of the engine. Gameplay is mostly the same, only we add some new aliens (1 so far in the story available in the alpha demo) and new playable ships in Super Melee (4 right now, of which 3 belong to new aliens). We have some cool starmaps available in the "Additional Downloads" section of the downloads page. There's also voice acting for some aliens. We're still quite far away from a full game, but we're slowly approaching the point where we can really start cranking out dialogue and content.

A trailer video that was relatively quickly thrown together a day before release:

If you happen to be running a flavor of Linux (or Windows) and need some assistance, feel free to ask me, as I'm the maintainer for the Debian-based Linux packages. If you're running some other distro, feel free to also ask for help as I'd probably be capable of helping you getting the thing compiled and ready to run.

EDIT: Err. Whoops. Kind of off-topic, but it's not like this thread hasn't already been derailed enough already (and it's quite old to begin with).